When you’re up late working until 3am and can’t wait to wake up to keep working, you know you’re in the right business. For me, that’s the business of making games.
The past couple of weeks have been extremely hectic, to say the least. Juggling the many aspects of preproduction can be quite difficult, especially when there are also several classes crowding your plate.
In the past few weeks, I’ve produced countless art assets and taken them through multiple iterations, created diagrams showing the specifics of our gameplay mechanics, and prototyped many of the main mechanics in our game while learning the ins and outs of Unity, all while simultaneously working on a Flash game as well.
It makes me tired just thinking about all that work, but I enjoyed every moment of it. And like all hard work in games, I think I deserve an achievement or two, perhaps these:
1. Seeing Ai to Ai
With all the vector art I’ve created in the past few weeks, I now know Adobe Illustrator (Ai) better than I ever have. Ai and I, we’re tight.
2. Off on a Tangent
Programming brings back all those memories of high school geometry. So first and foremost, a special thanks to Mrs. Jones for making me memorize soh-cah-toa (sine = opposite over hypotenuse, cosine = adjacent over hypotenuse, and tangent = opposite over adjacent). And thank you, Joe, for helping me remember what all that meant.
3. Design on a Dime
Everyone loves free stuff. To fill up two buy-six-coffees-get-one-free cards in a single week? Pure heaven.
4. Pitchin’ In
I can’t remember how many times I’ve pitched our game idea in the past several weeks. But with every pitch, I get more feedback, which makes our game stronger.
5. Master Juggler
As the main programmer and lead artist on our team, I’ve had to balance a lot of different tasks, and I have a feeling it’s not going to get much simpler anytime soon. So I guess it’s a good thing I love it so much.
Thank you, Term 4, for all the ups and downs. Ready or not, production officially starts in four days, so bring it, Term 5!